Disgraceful! Starmer Caves in to Board’s Racist Demands over Black Women MPs

Mike put up a piece on Saturday reporting that Labour leader Keir Starmer had caved in to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and reprimanded two leading and highly respected Black women MPs, Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy.

These two ladies offended the Board because they appeared in a conference on Zoom, whose audience included Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, who asked questions. The Board objected, as Jackie and Tony were two of the many people smeared as anti-Semites and expelled from the party. One of the noxious Ten Pledges that the Board persuaded Starmer and the other leadership contenders to sign was that no Labour member would share a platform with someone expelled for anti-Semitism. Hence Marie van der Zyl, the Board’s current president, sent in a complaint about the incident to Starmer calling for him to deal with them.

However, the Board’s complaint is wrong for a series of reasons. Firstly, Jackie and Tony weren’t actually expelled from the party for anti-Semitism. And as Mike says, saying that they’re anti-Semites simply because the Labour party said so has less weight than gossip.

Secondly, the two women weren’t sharing a platform with the two accused. They were merely in the audience. The fact that the van der Zyl and the Board chose to attack the two women anyway not only shows their determination to attack them, but also their failure to understand how Zoom works. Perhaps they’re like the American congressman, who was so ignorant about the internet when it first emerged in the ’90s that he asked if you needed a driver’s licence to go on the information superhighway as it then was.

Thirdly, while Starmer and the others are free to sign anything they wish, decisions affecting the party as a whole have to be ratified by conference. And the Ten Pledges weren’t. Starmer’s disciplining of the two women is therefore constitutional.

The Board’s complaint also looks more than a little racist itself. Zionism has a long history of collaborating with real anti-Semites and Fascists so long as its purposes are served. And these are frequently against the safety and wellbeing of the Jewish people as a whole. The Zionists in Nazi Germany supported the Nuremberg Laws, which defined Jews as racially distinct and incompatible with gentile Germans and signed the infamous Ha’avara Agreement in which the Nazis sent Jewish emigrants to Israel. During the War, the head of the Zionists in Hungary, Rudolf Kasztner, also made a pact with the Nazis to send tens of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz just so that a few could be sent to Israel. Israel has also supplied weapons and expertise to a string of Latin American dictatorships, including Guatemala when that nation’s government was exterminating the Mayans. When a neo-Nazi government took power in Argentina in the mid-70s and began persecuting Jews there, the Israeli government did not scruple to supply them with arms. Arms that were used against us during the Falklands War.

The Board defines itself as a Zionist organisation. It’s also politically right-wing, although perhaps not all its members are members and supporters of the Tories. And the Tories have hated Diane Abbott ever since she entered parliament in the 1980s. She was a left-wing firebrand, one of the first Black women MPs, who was determined to attack anti-Black racism. Over half of all the abusive messages sent to MPs go to her. She was one of those racially bullied by the Blairite plotters, according to the leaked anti-Semitism report. Not only did the scumbags reduce her to tears, but they told journalists where she was crying. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of Black anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth, who was accused of anti-Semitism and reducing a Jewish woman to tears after he caught her passing information on to a Telegraph journo at a meeting at which he was speaking. Yet instead of suspending the plotters, Starmer instead has disciplined Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy.

The Board’s record when it comes to defending Britain’s Jews against Fascism is blotchy. In the 1930s when Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was marching through the East End of London in order to intimidate the Jewish inhabitants, instead of standing up to them the Board advised Jews to stay indoors out of the way. Fortunately many courageous people ignored it, and joined Irish people, trade unionists and Communists in blocking Mosley’s march and giving his storm troops a well-deserved hiding.

The Board also showed the same twisted mentality forty years later in the 1970s when the National Front was on the rise and trying the same tactics. Instead of attacking them, the Board turned its fire on their opponents, the Anti-Nazi League. Jews were forbidden to join the organisation or allow it to hold meetings in synagogues. This was ostensibly because its founder was an anti-Zionist, and they were afraid of Jews hearing anti-Zionist propaganda. But others suspect that it was because the Board itself had White supremacist views.

Tony Greenstein has written a piece on his blog taking the Board and Starmer to task for their treatment of Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy. He discusses the shameful behaviour of the Board towards British Fascism, and quotes Maurice Ludmer, the Jewish founder of the anti-Nazi magazine, Searchlight.  Ludmer wrote in issue 41 of the magazine

“In the face of mounting attacks against the Jewish community both ideologically and physically, we have the amazing sight of the Jewish Board of Deputies launching an attack on the Anti Nazi League with all the fervour of Kamikaze pilots… It was as though they were watching a time capsule rerun of the 1930’s, in the form of a flickering old movie, with a grim determination to repeat every mistake of that era. “

The-then secretary of the Anti-Nazi League, Paul Holborrow, also wrote that they were under attack from the Board. Tony is annoyed that genuine anti-racists like himself are smeared as anti-Semites for opposing and criticising Israel, while genuine racists, like Katie Hopkins, were given an invitation by the Zionist Federation to attend their gala dinner and meet the Israeli ambassador, Mark Regev. As for the Board, its previous head, Jonathan Arkush, welcomed the election of Donald Trump. Trump’s a racist, and his cabinet included real anti-Semites. However, he got a pass because he supports Israel.

Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy issued an apology for their actions. They had no call to do so, being blameless and actually the real injured parties in this sordid case. Greenstein in his piece advises them to stand firm and act like two of the heroes of the civil rights struggle in America, Paul Robeson and Angela Davies.

Robeson was a member of the Communist Party, and was thus hauled before the House Inquiry on Un-American Activities. When McCarthy asked him if he was a Communist, Robeson refused to answer, challenging the senator instead to stand behind him the next time he voted and fish his voting paper out of the ballot box to see. Greenstein also doesn’t mention it, but it is a significant fact here that Robeson was also an opponent of anti-Semitism. He gave a concert in Moscow after the War at the end of which he sang a Yiddish song by the Jewish resistance fighters against Nazism. This was not just to celebrate the millions of Jews killed by the Nazis, but also the millions of Soviet citizens murdered by Stalin.

Angela Davies is a Black American civil rights activist, who last year, 2019, was given the Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award by the Civil Rights Institute of Birmingham, Alabama. However, the Alabama equivalent of the Board got mightily offended and complained, because Davies is a critic of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians, which she compares to the police’s maltreatment of Black Americans. The Alabama Board complained, and then issued an embarrassed retraction and apology for their own racism when Davies stood her ground and called them out instead.

And the British Board deserves to be called out on its racism. It includes as deputies individuals like Robert Festenstein, an islamophobe who appeared in a Rebel Media video with Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League and Pegida UK. Arkush and van der Zyl have also appeared at meetings in which members of the audience sported Jewish Defence League T-shirts. The JDL is a Judaeo-Nazi organisation, whose predecessor, Kach, is banned as a terrorist group in Israel. Unlike the majority of modern Jews, who strongly reject any idea that their religion makes them superior to anyone else, Kach was founded by Meir Kahane, an extreme right-wing rabbi. He really did believe that Jews are superior to gentiles, and urged Jews to arm themselves. He also absolutely believed that the Holy Land belonged solely to the Jews, and demanded the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people.

There’s a connection here to the militia movement that emerged in America during the ’90s. These were the successors to the Survivalists of the 1980s. They were arming themselves against the American government, which they believed had been corrupted by liberalism and was about to establish a murderous totalitarian dictatorship. According to their critics, such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre, the militias were White Supremacists with close connections to American Nazism and the Klan. However, according to Adam Palfrey’s Cult Rapture, an examination of American fringe culture in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing, there was also Jewish militia. This group also based their ideology on that of Kahane’s. Palfrey sees them, as well as the fact that the leader of one of the other militias was Black, that the movement as a whole wasn’t White Supremacist. I think he’s wrong, and it’s just that some parts of the movement were less strict in their racism than others, and were prepared to include Jews as fellow White Supremacists.

Now Arkush and Zyl did not meet the American Kahanists. But by speaking at meetings attended by their British cousins they have shown a culpable willingness to tolerate real Islamophobes with paramilitary sympathies. They deserve to be called out on this, as should the Zionist Federation for its endorsement of Hatey Katie.

Starmer should not be kowtowing to the Board and punishing real anti-racists like Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy. He should be backing them instead and holding the Board to account for their racism. As Angela Davies’ case shows, it can be done.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/05/02/keir-starmer-has-turned-labour-into-the-party-of-hypocrisy-and-racism/

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-new-mccarthyism-zionist-board-of.html

 

Turning Point UK Preparing Anti-Academic Witch Hunt

There’s some areas of the American right still pining for the days of the McCarthy witch hunts. And unfortunately, it looks like they want to export them to these shores as well. Turning Point UK is one of them. If you don’t remember, Turning Point UK is the British spawn of the American Conservative outfit, Turning Point USA. Founded by the repulsive Charlie Kirk, who ‘LIVES AS A CAPITALIST EVERY DAY’, as he shouted at the Young Turks’ Cenk Uighur, this is supposed to be dedicated to inspiring young people with right-wing ideals, turning back the evil tides of liberalism, socialism and so forth. Its British branch got off to a notoriously bad start when Candace Owens, another prominent American rightist, told the assembled faithful at its inauguration that Adolf Hitler wasn’t really a nationalist. She declared that what he did would have been all right if he’d stuck to his own country, but he wanted to make everyone German. This was the opposite of nationalism. This was the opposite of history and morality, as was soon pointed out to her. TPUK have kept a quiet profile since. So much so that it has been suggested that the outfit is no more than a trick to part elderly American Conservatives from their money through encouraging them to donate to it, so little has it actually done. Unfortunately, it still seems to be around and making a nuisance of itself. Zelo Street has posted a couple of articles about the organisation posting attack ads libeling former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and leadership contender Rebecca Long-Bailey as anti-Semites, terrorist supporters and claiming they aid paedophiles.

And now Zelo Street has also reported that one of its scummy number has announced on Twitter that they want to import their parent organisation’s campaign of blacklisting left-wing academics. TPUSA has a ‘Professor Watchlist’ of academics they claim have a ‘left-wing agenda’. One critic, the Skeptical Seventh, has said of this that “They must know that what they are doing will lead to people being harassed, being shut down … It is undermining academic freedom, which is ironic for an organisation that claims to be in favour of free speech”. Yes, but for them it’s a case of free speech for me, but not for thee. However, the Beeb reported that it had been told by Dominique Samuels, one of the TPUK’s influencers, that they wouldn’t be introducing that policy over here.

This has been flat-out contradicted by the odious Darren Grimes. Grimes was upset when Priyamvada Gopal, a lecturer at Cambridge, tweeted a particularly apt quote from Lord Macauley to describe Priti Patel. She said:  “We should acknowledge, as we look at Priti Patel, that there was one very successful cultural eugenics project: ‘We must at present do our best to form…a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’”. This was too much for Grimes, who didn’t recognise the quote, and ranted  “This person is a lecturer at Cambridge. Is it any wonder our students are churned out of these university factories like hard-left, braindead sheep when this is what is teaching them?! What a truly bloody horrendous thing to think, never mind tweet”. Gopal herself was highly amused by Grimes’ reaction. She said “Before I withdraw again for a bit, I thought I should share my enjoyment of Mr Grimes’ condemnation of Lord Macaulay’s  ‘truly bloody horrendous thing to think’ … The great thing about British far-right is their complete ignorance of their own history &  literature”. Macauley’s comment demanding the anglicisation of Indians is notorious. It frequently appears in textbooks as an illustration of the hostile attitude of the British colonisers to their subject peoples’ indigenous cultures.

The TPUK twitter feed then joined in with the ominous statement “Our uni campuses are overrun by leftist lecturers who teach their overt political bias as objective truth. This is not ok. The fight back begins now. Introducing ‘Education Watch’: Documenting University Lecturers’ Political Bias”.

This is, as Zelo Street has commented, the right using the false assumption that not only do they have the right to their own opinions, but also their facts, to start a witch hunt. And as Grimes was at the launch of Toby Young’s wretched Free Speech Union, it also shows that’s a sham as well.

Paul Bernal, an associate professor of Law at UEA, commented: “Can I just ask, what do the thought-police *want* us lefty academics to teach our students? Obviously facts are out. Analysis is against the law. Nothing foreign. Nothing expert”.

Tim concluded his article on this latest right-wing assault on free speech with the observation that TPUK were obviously trying to whip up hate and harassment because they were so desperate for the publicity. And so he was sure that they would be condemned by all good Conservatives.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/02/turning-point-uk-turning-nasty.html

Let’s be clear what Turning Point are demanding – the harassment and purging from academic of lecturers, whose politics they disapprove of. This is a feature of just about every totalitarian regime and movement. The Italian Fascists did it. The Nazis did it in the ‘coordination’ of the universities, which saw Jews and Marxists purged. The Communists did it. And it got really unpleasant in China under Mao during the Cultural Revolution, when children were called upon to denounce their parents and teachers. The BNP or National Front also tried something like it in Britain in the 1980s. They urged nationalist schoolchildren to write to them informing on ‘Communist’ teachers. They would then send a couple of their thugs round to assault them. TPUK haven’t called for having them attacked, but this is what such a list would lead to.

As for this wave of left-wing lecturers churning out a generation of impressionable kids indoctrinated with cultural Marxism or whatever, this is, in my opinion, somewhat of an hysterical overreaction. Yes, there are outspoken left-wing academics, and always have been. But there are also Conservatives and all shades of political opinion in between. And, with a few obvious exceptions, such as those calling for sectarian or racist violence and hatred, for example, they should all have the right to teach what they believe to be objective fact. Because this is what democracy and freedom of speech means.

Freedom of speech and conscience means putting up with speech, ideas and opinions of which you don’t necessarily approve. It certainly does not mean tolerating only those opinions that you share. That, whether done by the left or the right, leads to intolerance and persecution.

And in the intellectual context, it also means the massive impoverishment of national culture. As a result of the Nazi purges of the universities and the arts, German culture suffered immensely. That of other countries, particularly America, benefited immensely, as talented scientists, mathematicians, writers, film-makers and artists took sanctuary on the other side of the Pond. It’s been said that if the Nazis hadn’t taken power, and pushed their greatest minds abroad, the 20th would have been hailed as the German century rather than the American.

This is what Turning Point would like to do to America, and which their equally idiotic counterparts on this side of the Pond would like to do over here – a stifling, stagnant, impoverished culture in order to enforce their own intellectual agenda.

 

Gideon Falter’s Lies and Smears at CAA Rally Against Corbyn

On Sunday, the deliberately misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism held a rally outside the Labour Party’s HQ, protesting against the party’s anti-Semitism and demanding the removal of Jeremy Corbyn. The CAA’s leader, Gideon Falter, declared that Corbyn had made the party a haven for anti-Semites and Holocaust Deniers.

As Falter knows, or should know, this is a flat-out lie. Corbyn has always campaigned against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. And the stats from his own wretched organisation show that under Corbyn’s leadership, anti-Semitism in the Labour party has actually fallen. It’s now lower than in other parties, such as the Tories, and wider British society, where it has actually risen.

But the CAA aren’t worried about such inconvenient things as facts. They’re true-blue Tories to a man and woman, and the organisation’s real purpose has absolutely nothing to do with combating anti-Semitism. They’re a pro-Israel outfit, who use the standard Zionist tactic of smearing the country’s critics as anti-Semites when they make awkward criticisms of it and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. This treatment includes apartheid, massacre and ethnic cleansing. But any mention of this, even by respected journalists, is rigorously policed and suppressed by the Israel lobby, who accuse those reporting it or commenting on it as anti-Semites. In the past, those reporters, who have been so attacked have included the Beeb’s Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin. And also Jonathan Dimbleby, when he made a comment objecting to the smears against his colleagues.

This alone shows how the anti-Semitism smears are a real, political witch-hunt, of the type Arthur Miller described in his classic play, The Crucible. This used the 17th century Salem witch hunt as a metaphor for the McCarthy witch hunts against suspected Communists in ’50s America. Which is also appropriate, given the way various speakers at the CAA rally seemed to be convinced that he was another Marxist.

In fact, the numbers who turned up for the CAA’s rally were small. There were no more than 250 of them, which is about the entire membership of the CAA plus a few of their mates. So, hardly a mass movement showing widespread discontent against the Labour leader.

And Falter also crossed the line when he demanded Corbyn’s removal. The CAA is registered as a charity. Under the rules of the Charity Commission, registered organisations have to be non-political. But the CAA has clearly broken this regulation by demanding the Labour leader’s removal. As a result, Tony Greenstein, a long-time critic of Israel, who has also been smeared as an anti-Semite by the Israel lobby, posted up on his website yesterday a new post about the internet petition requesting the Charity Commission to remove it as a registered charity. 5,000 people had signed it so far. Mr Greenstein was hoping this would double by the end of this week.

The CAA’s pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian agenda was inadvertently demonstrated by comic actress Maureen Lipman, who spread her own lies and falsehoods at the rally. Lipman turned up with a placard saying ‘Corbyn Made Me a Tory’, and made a speech in which she claimed that she had left the Labour party because of Jeremy Corbyn. Whoops! No, she didn’t!. She left the Labour party in 2014 after the election of Ed Miliband as leader. This was because ‘Red’ Ed had also proposed some pro-Palestinian policies. She was complaining then about how his election showed that Labour was anti-Semitic. Hardly. Most people would probably argue otherwise, as Miliband is of Jewish heritage. For some people, some of the attacks on him and his father, Ralph, such as those of the Daily Mail, also had very nasty anti-Semitic overtones. As Mike’s article on this shows, the internet has been having immense fun with Lipman’s selective memory. Jokes about her include the suggestion that she has a time machine to go back to Ed Miliband’s election, so she could resign then in protest against Corbyn’s election.

Lipman also let the cat out of the bag about the real, underlying reason for the protests against Corbyn. She attacked him for always criticising Israel, and sticking up for the Palestinians. This is exactly the reason behind these allegations, and the pressure on the Labour party to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that defines as including criticism of Israel. This is despite the fact that Wilhelm Marr, the noxious German politico, who founded modern anti-Semitism in the 19th century and who coined the term, defined it solely as hatred of Jews as Jews.

I’m not surprised Lipman turned up at the rally. She has appeared in the press making noises about how Corbyn is a supporter of ‘terrorism’. She said it a month or so ago in an interview in the pages of the Radio Times. At the rally, she also claimed that Corbyn was a Marxist, who was trying to bring it back because it had worked so well in the rest of the world.

As so many people have pointed out, including Mike over at Vox Political and this blog, Corbyn isn’t a Marxist. He’s actually centre left, closer to the social democratic consensus which advocated a mixed economy, strong trade unions and social mobility. George Galloway despatched the accusation that Corbyn was a Marxist a year or so ago. The Scots political maverick stated that he’d known Corbyn for a very long time, and he wasn’t. But why let inconvenient facts get in the way of a good, Tory and Blairites smear?

The accusation that Corbyn’s a Marxist says nothing about him, but it says plenty about Lipman and her supporters. Rather than being a ‘disenfranchised socialist’ as she claimed, she comes across as another Blairite, worried that Blair’s policy of handing large sections of the state over to private industry is now going to be stopped by Corbyn. Communism didn’t work, although the capitalism that succeeded it in Russia hasn’t made things any better for ordinary people over there either. And neoliberal capitalism is failing here. It has brought ordinary working people in Britain and across the world nothing but poverty, starvation and hardship, all for the profit of big business and the immensely rich. Corbyn’s right to end it.

The CAA’s rally on Sunday was a pathetic affair, at which they just spewed the usual accusations against the Labour leader, all in support of the real reason for wanting his removal: to continue the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians without criticism, and keep the Blairite neoliberals in control of the Labour party. It’s depressing to see Maureen Lipman supporting them, as normally I have a lot of respect for her. But all too often you find that people you respect have monstrous or repulsive views in some area or another, and Lipman is no different.

Ilan Pappe on Israel’s Foundational Myths and the Oppression of the Palestinians: Part 1

I’ve been blogging recently on Israel’s oppression of the indigenous Palestinians, because of its relevance to the recent allegations of anti-Semitism against leading members of the Labour party, such as Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Naz Shah and so on. None of the accused are anti-Semitic. Ken Livingstone has always stood against any and every form of racism. Indeed, back in the 1980s the former GLC under his leadership was notorious for it and its campaigns against sexism. Shah has the support of her local synagogue, which argues profoundly against her having any hatred of Jews. As for Jackie Walker, she is half-Jewish, and her partner is Jewish. Her mother was a Black civil rights activist, who was thrown out of America as a Commie during the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Her father was a Russian Jew, and so probably knew all too well from his personal experience, or that of his parents, what real anti-Semitism is like. Their real crime was that they made comments critical of Israel, which the militant Israel lobby, BICOM, the Labour Friends of Israel and Blairite faction in the Labour party, all automatically and quite arbitrarily defined as anti-Semitic.

Criticism of Israel is not automatically anti-Semitic, just as criticising the government of my country and its policies does not automatically make anyone ‘anti-British’, and certainly not when real historic or present oppression is involved.

The video below, made by the human rights group Americans for a Just Peace in the Middle East, is a long interview with the courageous Israeli historian and pro-Palestinian activist Ilan Pappe in his office at the University of Haifa in Israel, where he formerly taught. Dr Pappe no longer teaches there, as his scholarship and views are now so controversial and bitterly hated in his native country, that he has been forced abroad, and is now head of the history department at Exeter University in Devon, here in Britain.

Pappe had conventional views on the foundation of Israel, until his examination of Israel’s own archives and those of the British government revealed that the standard, accepted view of his country’s origins was merely a myth, contrived to justify the state’s oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians, the country’s indigenous inhabitants. He was one of a group, who became known as the New Historians, 3-4 historians, who working independently came to the same views. They included Benny Morrison, who since then has recanted. In the interview, Pappe talks about his experience researching the origins of Israel, the country’s founding myths, and his own experiences and that of some of the history students around him of academic and personal persecution and ostracism, and Israel’s possible future. Pappe states that he was interested in researching the British files on the foundation of Israel, as Britain under the Mandate was the occupying power, and he wondered how we saw the situation, as he believed the British hated both sides equally. Interspersed with Dr Pappe’s own comments are quotations from some of Israel’s leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dyan and Menachem Begin. These are chilling and horrifying in their cold-blooded espousal of violence, brutality and massacre in their ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Pappe states there are three myths about the foundation of Israel. These are:

1. It was a struggle between David and Goliath, with the nascent Jewish state the weaker combatant.

2. The Palestinians were hostile to the Jewish settlers from the start, and that they threatened the Jews with another Holocaust.

3. Israel has offered the Palestinians peace countless times, which they have repeatedly turned down.

He goes on to refute each of these.

He states that the War of Independence of 1948 certainly was not a conflict in which Israel was the weaker party. Israel and the invading Arab armies both had the same number of men and armaments. Israel was additionally helped by the fact that they had cut a deal with the Jordanians, who had been promised the West Bank if they did not fight alongside the other Arab nations. Nevertheless, the myth that Israel won against overwhelming odds has given the Israeli people the idea that they are invincible supermen. He states that this image can be seen in American movies, and the converse is true about Arabs and in particular the Palestinians. They are presented as the mysterious Other, hostile and cowardly.

He states that the Palestinians were not immediately hostile to the Jewish immigrants when they began to settle in Palestine. He states that Palestinians are Arabs, and the Arabs are very hospitable. This is true. It’s one of the characteristics, that have endeared the Arab people to many Westerners. People I’ve known, who’ve travelled to Egypt have told me about the unforced generosity of its people. Pappe states that many of the new settlers were taken in by their new Arab hosts, as the Palestinians felt sorry for them because many of them were very poor. This changed in the late 1920s when it became clear that not only did the Jewish immigrants not want to be guests, they wanted to be the possessors of the whole house, and its sole possessors at that.

As for rejecting the Israeli peace deal, the truth was it was the other way around. It was the Palestinians who first sued for peace in 1948. Furthermore, many of the peace deals that have been advanced by the Israelis since then have demanded such major territorial concession from the Palestinians, that they would be automatically unacceptable to every other nation as well, if they were placed in a similar position.

He also discusses the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. He states that after Israel’s victory in the 1948 War, the Jewish population was only 690,000 against 900,000 + Palestinians. They therefore began a deliberate policy of terror and harassment in order to force them out, as shown very clearly by the quotations from the Israeli leaders used in the video. The Israelis justified this through another myth: that the Palestinians had been encouraged to leave their homeland by the other Arabs, who told them that they could return to their homes after victory had been won. Pappe states that his examination of the records of the British listening posts showed that no such call was ever made. He also states very clearly that leading Israeli politicians, like David Ben-Gurion, who served as its president, are deeply implicated in this cleansing. Ben-Gurion was head of the organisation which had overall authority over the resettlement programme, and so had ultimate responsibility for its policies.

The Spartacus Blog on the Tories’ Control of the BBC

There’s a piece over at the Spartacus Blog entitled ‘History of How the Tory Party Controls the BBC’. This describes how the links of the Tory party with the BBC, and how it has tried to curb left-wing influence, since Waldron Smithers, the Tory MP for Orpington, in 1947 tried to set up an anti-Communist witch hunt similar to McCarthy’s in the US. He was also concerned about whether Commies were also taking over the Beeb.

It then moves on to discuss the number of BBC news presenters and reporters, who have gone to work for or support the Tories, like Nick Robinson, Thea Rogers, Andrew Neil, Craig Oliver, Guto Harri, Will Walden, Jeremy Paxman, and Evan Davis.

http://spartacus-educational.com/spartacus-blogURL71.htm

This is of real importance, because of all the channels, the Beeb has been shown to be most biased towards the Tories in its news coverage by academics. And it has been particularly critical of Jeremy Corbyn. This gives some indication of how far the Tory influence goes. In addition, the Tories are also threatening to privatise the BBC, which probably also isn’t helping matters.

Government Cuts: The BBC Defends their Bias

I’ve just started reading Who Needs the Cuts, by Barry and Saville Kushner, published last year by Hesperus Press. It’s a fascinating book, written in straightforward, uncomplicated language by two professionals in the political sphere. According to the blurb, Barry Kushner is a regeneration consultant supporting organisations working in the third sector, and now a city councillor in his home town of Liverpool. Saville Kushner is professor of Public Evaluation at the University of Auckland, who has written widely on democracy and public knowledge and worked for a short while for UNICEF in Latin America.

In the first chapter, Barry Kushner describes what moved him to begin researching the issue of the government cuts, and led to the two brother actively campaigning against them. It came from him attending a meeting of a ‘Children with Disabilities’ planning group in a town in the north-west of England, which he had been brought in to support. The group had been set up to bring together the parents of disabled children, and government officials and care providers as part of Labour’s Aiming High for Disabled Children. The group had hoped to build a respite centre to allow parents and carers a break from the strains of looking after their children. At the last minute, Kushner was informed that the project had been cancelled thanks to Gideon George Osborne’s cuts, and Kushner was given the unenviable job of telling the parents this. Not only was Kushner upset by the sudden cancellation of this much-needed facility, he was profoundly dismayed by the way the parents themselves, who had put so much into getting the project going in the first place, where left crushed and defenceless against the politicians’ story that there was simply no alternative to the cuts. He remarks on how easy it was for all the hard work that had been put in giving parents the confidence to come together to work for improving things for disabled children and their carers to be destroyed in a matter of moments.

Also driving Kushner in his campaign was his experiences at Croxteth Comprehensive school in Liverpool, where he had been a teacher during Maggie Thatcher’s infamous reign in the 1980s. Croxteth had been one of the most deprived areas in the country, and the school was scheduled for closure. The parents and teachers responded to the news by occupying the school and taking it over. Three years later they won their campaign, and the school was saved. In 2009 Kushner attended a reunion of everyone, who had been involved in the occupation. One of those he met was ‘Sean’, who had been ‘a cute, mischievous’ boy of 11 when it all happened. Sean was now forty, and had just come of the drugs he’d been on for the past 22 years. He went through one of the photographs showing the other kids, who were at school during the occupation. At least seven of these children were now dead.

The Kushner’s state that the story that the cuts are necessary is extremely flimsy indeed, and compare it to Joe McCarthy’s tactics during the Communist witch-hunts in the US. McCarthy’s evidence of Communist infiltration was just as a extremely flimsy. At meetings he claimed to have a list of Communists, waving a bunch of papers that were supposed to have their names. In fact, he had no such list and in many cases those papers were completely blank. This tactic nevertheless cowed the press and much of officialdom into blandly accepting his specious claims. The Coalition, and Labour politicians like Alistair Darling, who also took on board the supposed necessity for the cuts, similarly have little real evidence to back up their claims, and are resorting instead to scare tactics. This, unfortunately, has been remarkably effective, with the even the victims of the cuts, like the parents in the above meeting, unable to rebut the arguments. It has left the nation defenceless against an austerity programme several times more severe than previous retrenchment programmes. The book is their response to these specious claims, and has arisen from their own campaign against it, which has led them to speak up and down the country, including in my own home town of Bristol.

It’s an excellent book, and I hope to post a full review, giving some of their arguments against the cuts in due course.

What strikes me now, having posted about the BBC’s right-wing bias, is the Kushner’s description of the way the BBC has promoted the line that the cuts are necessary. They note that there are numerous economists, who have stated that the cuts are not necessary, and that growth, when it occurs, will wipe out the debt. These other voices are either totally ignored by the mainstream media, or else relegated to a footnote. The Kushner’s wrote to some of the journalists and programme managers pushing this line, like the BBC’s economics editor, Stephanie Flanders, and Evan Davies. In her report for 9th of September 2011, Flanders claimed that the poor economic growth from which the country was suffering was due to good weather, the Japanese tsunami and the royal wedding. When she was asked why she didn’t mention that the slump in retail sales and manufacturing along with the redundancies caused by the cuts were also having an effect, and that consumer confidence was at an all-time low, Flanders gave the following reply:

‘We were providing the explanation provided by the ONS, the independent statistical body. If this was not emphasised yesterday, that was simply because there were other things to focus on in a 2.5 minute package, and the broad political and economic arguments about austerity are now so well understood by our viewers’. As Private Eye responds, when given similar brush-offs, ‘So that’s alright, then’. The Kushners note that her role in the BBC was news analysis, not reporting. Her actions in simply regurgitating the ONS’ view was more in line with her previous job as advisor and speechwriter to Larry Summers. They also note that she had also worked with the US treasury secretary as he led the deregulation of the banks, that ‘unleashed the whirlwind of mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps, sub-prime mortgages and over-leveraged banks that sit behind the whole debt issue’.

Barry Kushner also states that they attempted to make their points known by writing into the BBC and the Guardian, sending a series of emails and taking part on phone-ins on the radio. They stated repeatedly in their correspondence and telephone calls that ‘although the BBC’s coverage reflected the political consensus it did not reflect the broader economic analysis represented by numerous economists and people on both sides of the political spectrum… We begged the question, doesn’t the BBC have duty to do this?’ They received the following reply from a senior executive at BBC News:

‘The Editorial Guidelines state that we strive to reflect a wide range of opinion and explore a range and conflict of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under-represented. However, reflecting a broad range of views is not the same as giving equal weight to all shades of opinion and nor are we required to give totally comprehensive coverage.’

They state that this attitude appears to be shared by journalists, even when they know that their analysis is incomplete. They wrote a letter to Evan Davies after he interviewed Unite’s general secretary, Len McCluskey. This, they state, was far more severe than anything he had dished out to Danny Alexander, George Osborne or the other government ministers. They wanted to know why this was so, and why Davies had prevented McCluskey from elaborating on his argument and why he had not subjected government ministers to a similarly intensive grilling. As an example, the Kushners state they wanted to know why ministers were not required to explain the significance of the low level of national debt and borrowing on their planning for the cuts? The Kushners have already made the point that despite the hysterical claims of the politicos, the national debt is at its lowest for 200 out of 250 years. The argument that somehow these cuts are necessary to pay of this massive national debt is nonsensical.

Davies replied: ‘I personally think there are arguments to be made for not dealing with the deficit at the moment. Indeed there are arguments for monetising it too. But these need to be set out by those who assert them, not by me.’

To which they comment: ‘So Evan knows the answers, but won’t tell us what they are? Aren’t journalists supposed to use their knowledge and experience to ask more intelligent, searching questions?’ From the book’s description about the way Davies prevented McCluskey from developing his arguments further, it’s actually worse than that. Davies clearly knows the opposing arguments, but not only does he not feel it is his job to present them, he is actively obstructing those who do.

Commenting on my last post about BBC right-wing bias, Anna listed a number of BBC journalists with right-wing connections, like Nick Robinson, who used to be part of the Union of Conservative Students. It’s clear from reading Who Needs the Cuts that the BBC, like much of the rest of the media, is actively promoting the Coalition’s flimsy message that the cuts are somehow necessary almost unquestioned. The book notes that both Andrew Marr and John Humphries have started interviews with politicians stating that the cuts are necessary, ‘but..’, and that this political message is so prevalent that it has turned Question Time into a ‘cutsfest’. The executives at the BBC and their Tory allies won’t suffer from the cuts, however, although the Tories are dangling the prospect of freezing the license fee and privatisation in front of the Beeb to make it come to heel whenever it appears to get a bit uppity. The people who really suffer are us, including disabled children and their families, and the deprived kids being denied a proper education, and left to die of drugs and squalor like those Barry Kushner taught in Croxteth. They’re the real casualties. And the Beeb won’t be reporting on them any time soon.

The Kushners lament that we are going back to Maggie Thatcher and her policy of cuts in the 1980s, though without the massive opposition she faced – they were also active on marching against her – or even Spitting Image. It was in the 1980s that I remember the issue of the Conservative bias of the news media was raised with a vengeance. One of the best comments on it was ‘News of the World’, by the Clash, now used as the theme music for the Beeb’s satirical news quiz, Mock the Week. If we’re going back to the ’80s, we may as well enjoy some classic rock. Enjoy!